


Magic 2.0

by TwilightMaster15



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga), Magic 2.0 Series - Scott Meyer
Genre: Computer Programming, Hacking, M/M, Macros, Magic 2.0 AU, Some Humor, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25239919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwilightMaster15/pseuds/TwilightMaster15
Summary: When bored genius Light Yagami discovers the world is nothing more than a computer program controlled by an omniscient file, he decides to use his programming skills to use this to change the world, gaining a name as Kira and believing himself to be the only one able to use the file.Little does he know, the entire task force searching for him, including the famous detective, L, have also found the file at one point or another separately and are using their powers to find the person using the file to kill people. However, none of them trust each other with this information for concern of sounding insane, and thus everyone hides their connection to the file and hinders the investigation.An adventure of time-traveling officers and kids with superpowers only becomes more insane when a model finds the file, and Light's notebook he uses to harness his death powers falls into the hands of someone without prior knowledge of the file and believes this the work of magic.
Relationships: L/Yagami Light
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU of the Magic 2.0 series. There may be references to the books and the characters within, but this is more what could happen in other instances of the file since other wizards were mentioned in Magic 2.0 canon.

Terror.

Light Yagami enjoyed science and many other things that could fill the empty void of his life. As a child, he read about people who made huge, world-changing discoveries, and he had wondered what emotions he would feel if he ever discovered something really earth-shattering. Now he had made just such a discovery, and he was surprised to find that the answer was absolute unrelenting terror. 

He didn't consider himself a hacker. He didn't like the image that the label implied. Sure, he'd experimented with the whole pose, but found that he had no interest in using it for his gain as that would not benefit his desire to pursue justice like his father. So, Light decided that he wasn't a hacker. He was just a guy who really liked monkeying with computers. 

Light was spending the evening his usual way, poking around the internet for fun to satisfy his boredom. His TV droned away in the background with the news playing, providing ambient light, occasional distraction, and the illusion of human contact. He knew that many of the things he was doing were technically illegal, but he kept his tampering strictly harmless, or even beneficial—he mostly just used it to obtain new information. Nobody knew he knew more classified information that even his father probably did. That way, the authorities wouldn't bother with him as long as more destructive perpetrators roamed free. He told himself that, but he was too smart to really believe it. That didn't stop him from waking up his computer every evening and seeing what he could see. 

Tonight, he was poking around the servers of a cell phone manufacturer that had been in business since the 1930s when they made AM radios the size of post boxes. He hadn't done anything bad. He didn't have to force his way in. Anyone with a working knowledge of network structure and a willingness to look at a tremendous amount of stupefyingly boring information could have found the file. 

It was the kind of file nobody would ever look at. Five terabytes of plain ASCII text characters. Even its name made Light sleepy—repository1-c.txt. However, the moment that Light thought, _"No sane person would be interested in a file like that,"_ was the moment he decided to give it a look. 

He figured it would take far too long to download, so instead, he chose to access it directly using a terminal emulator. When it opened, the file appeared to be an endless series of huge, discrete data blocks. The individual chunks were massive tangles of numbers tossed with rare pieces of recognizable text. He might have disregarded the file entirely if not for the fact that many of the numbers appeared to be constantly changing. He double-checked. This was his default text editor, and it hadn't, as far as he knew, been updated to allow this sort of thing. But, there it was. 

The first thing Light always did when he found some new data file was to search for his own name. It may seem egocentric, but Light wasn't worried about that. He had spent a lot of time thinking about himself and had come to the conclusion that he was definitely not self-absorbed. He searched for "Light Yagami." Usually, a word search on a simple text file took no time at all. Plain text is easy for a computer to work with. Due to the sheer size of the file, though, Light's search for himself took nearly ten minutes. It finally found his name lodged toward the back of the file.

He spent over an hour peering at the data and eventually teased out some recognizable information. Whoever had made this file knew _a lot_ about him. He was irritated to find his height was wrong. It wasn't labeled height—it was just the number. But it was unmistakable. Five feet, eleven inches. It was wrong that while that might be how tall Light was if you went to the trouble of measuring him, he'd been putting six feet on every form he'd filled out since starting high school. It was a small detail, but he still found himself irritated by it. He edited the number and hit save. He spent a few moments looking around at various numbers in the file, then got up as his knees started locking up. 

Light stretched his arms, stood up quickly, and felt a terrible discomfort in his groin. It was like someone had grabbed the waistband of his khakis and pulled upward. They'd always been a little tight—he liked pants that constantly reminded you that you were wearing pants—but they never caused him anything like this sort of discomfort. He looked down at his waist as he breathed through a peculiar spasm of pain in his spine. His belt was right where it usually sat, and now that he looked, the hems were slightly higher on his ankles than he'd remembered. 

_Weird,_ he thought, as he pulled his pants down a bit and walked into the bathroom and into the medicine cabinet in search of some Advil because the pain in his back was unpleasant. He frowned, seeing dust building up on top of the medicine cabinet and thought that he should really clean up there. Nobody dusted that spot often, because nobody could see up there—which had always proven frustrating to Light. After all, he had always been really close to and could if he stood on his tip-toes. He stared at the dust, letting that thought sink in until another spasm hit him, like growing pains but so much worse. 

He took some Advil, laughing to himself, knowing he was just a little paranoid. His pants rode up. It probably meant he was gaining weight. Not a good thing in Light's eyes, even if his father would be thrilled since it would mean he was "recovering," but nothing to freak out about. And the medicine cabinet had probably settled a bit, or one of its support screws had torn free of the drywall, or maybe he imagined the whole thing. Sitting around all night in a dark bedroom with the TV and computer screens providing ambient light was bound to affect your perception after a while. 

No... As he examined the medicine cabinet, he realized it was still fastened firmly to the wall and didn't appear to have moved. He could still see the dust-covered top, and furthermore, he was pretty sure he had always been able to look himself in the eye when he looked at the cabinet's mirrored front. He remembered the mirror cutting him off about halfway through his eyebrows. He was looking in the mirror now, and he was cut off closer to his eyes. He looked at his feet again to reassure himself that he was barefoot. Then he just stood there, being confused.

 _Enough of this,_ Light thought. He went to the hallway closet to dig through the toolbox, pulling out a measuring tape and a carpenter's square.

He grabbed a pencil and stood with his back to the frame of his bedroom door. He placed the carpenter's square on his head and carefully made a mark where the square met the wall. Light smirked at himself for wasting his time like this as he ran the tape measure up the wall to the mark. He leaned in close to read the measuring tape. 

The mark met the tape just a touch above the six feet mark. 

He repeated the process and got the same result.

_Clearly, I've gradually grown an inch over the course of the last few years and only noticed it now, right after changing my height in a weird text file I found online. That's normal. An inch isn't even that big a deal, right?_

Light sat at his computer and looked at the file while he thought. He wanted to just start changing things to show himself how silly he was being, but he also wanted to close the file and pretend he'd never found it, so he just sat there. 

After twenty minutes of this, he decided he had to prove once and for all that he was just being paranoid and was wrong about this one thing. The cursor was still at the same place he'd left it at the height notation. Light edited six feet to read six feet one inch, knowing that was his limit if this was somehow not just something he was imagining since anything else could be seriously damaging. 

He groaned miserably and had to just sit there as the weird pains returned with force. Was he coming down with something?

Once he had his bearings, he walked back to the bedroom door, standing straight and tall with his back against the door jamb. He carefully placed the square on his head and marked its location with a pencil. He methodically ran the tape measure up the wall, taking care to make sure it was plumb, and noted with great interest that his height now measured six feet one inch tall. 

He measured himself again. Five times. He'd have tried a sixth time, but his hands were shaking too badly to make a legible mark. 

He sat and stared at the TV for about an hour. He had no idea what was on, and he didn't care. He walked back to his computer, re-edited his height to five feet, eleven inches, and closed the file. He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. 

He looked himself in the eye in the medicine cabinet mirror. 

He went to bed. Not to sleep. To bed. Every light in his bedroom was now on, as were his clothes. He lay there and thought about the implications of what had just happened, and that was when he felt the terror. Everyone who paid any attention to science fiction, or for that matter to science, eventually came across the concept that reality as we knew it was a computer program. That people were subroutines. That we weren't biological organisms clinging to a ball of rock hurtling around a ball of fire suspended in a sea of nothing. We were simulated organisms attached to a virtual ball of rock, located in an unfathomable program that could be a game, a weather simulation, or even a screensaver. 

_Well, not a screensaver,_ Light thought. _Any society advanced enough to produce a program this sophisticated would have long since developed a monitor that didn't burn-in._

Once Light's mental state had downgraded from terror to severe agitation, he saw the irony. Since the beginning of recorded time, mankind had debated the nature of existence. The greatest thinkers spent their entire lives wrestling with fundamental questions. Even basic discoveries like the wheel and the lever had made profound differences in humanity's existence. Now Light had proof of precisely what they were and the means to change things instantly, with almost no effort. 

With one accidental discovery, Light had become the most crucial figure in human history, and he desperately wished he could take it all back. 

Light looked at the clock. It was 3am. He'd been lying there, staring at the ceiling and staving off panic, for six hours. He got up, downed two sleeping pills—beyond grateful that it was the weekend—turned off the lights, and eventually lost consciousness, unsure what he could possibly do with this newfound information. 

OoOoO

It had now been two days since he had found the file. Light stared aimlessly out the window at school, realizing he could remember almost nothing about his day. He had drifted through it in a haze, and he knew that he had worried his father last night—his mother was only concerned about his grades, and he had long since accepted that. 

He walked out of the school on auto-pilot once he heard the bell, still torn about the implications of the file. Nobody would believe him if he told anyone. This couldn't go on. He resolved that he would spend the rest of his life pretending that the file didn't exist. 

Light slumped, listening to the news being loudly broadcast throughout the city, "Today, at approximately 11am a 32-year-old man was found stabbed to death in his apartment in the city of Yokohama Karigara Prefecture. Karigawa police are treating this case as a homicide. In other news, today, suspected murderer Naoki Tokuji was arrested in the district of Shibuya, Tokyo. He is being held in custody facing murder charges for the brutal slaying of his common-law partner, who was only 25 at the time of death."

The world was just rotten. Sure, Light knew now that the world was a computer program, but what did that really change in the grande scheme of things?

He walked home as fast as he could and immediately turned on his computer and opened the file. _I can't pretend it doesn't exist unless I figure out exactly what it is._

He searched for his name again and found the chunk of data that defined his existence. He knew where his height was, but the other useful metrics proved harder to define. His intelligence, his percentage of body fat, his strength, and his level of health were all impossible to quantify objectively, regardless of what people pitching diet plans said. 

He found his weight but dared not change it. He reasoned that weighing less didn't mean necessarily being less fat. He could easily render himself less dense. He could imagine his parents attending his funeral, being asked how their son had died, and having to admit that nobody could explain it, but he'd somehow spontaneously become a foam.

He turned a bit, seeing the TV informing him of yet another crime.

"The same assailant who attacked six people at a busy shopping district in Sinjuku yesterday has struck again, taking eight people hostage at this daycare center. His captives include both children and teachers. The police have now identified the suspect as 42-year-old Kuro Otoharada, currently unemployed. We expect negotiations to begin immediately."

Light frowned, looking up Kuro Otoharada in the file and finding him very quickly. He also saw a ton of obscure numbers in a tab and decided that he wanted to know what it did, and maybe it would help the situation. The number was 620174, and he changed it to zero.

Within seconds, the news reporters were shouting about movement at the front entrance,

"The hostages are coming out, and they all look to be unharmed! The Special Forces are taking action; they're moving in! We don't know if the suspect's been arrested. Huh? Yes? Okay, we now have confirmation. The suspect has been found dead inside! I repeat the suspect is now dead!"

Light's eyes widened, looking back at the file and what he had edited, "Dead?!"

"The Special Forces deny allegations that they shot the suspect. According to statements from hostages, the suspect just suddenly collapsed."

 _No way! It's a coincidence! This has to be a coincidence!_ He jumped up, stumbling back from his computer as he realized that whatever that particular number was, it allowed him to alter and take lives. 

"Light!" He heard his mother call, "It's already 6:30, you know! Don't you have cram school tonight?"

"Yeah," he called back absently, "I'll be ready in just a sec."

_I really… I killed a man. That was a human life that I experimented on and murdered—though I suppose technically it's manslaughter. Besides, who am I to pass judgment on others?_

Light found himself spacing out ruthlessly, to the point he wasn't taking anything from anybody, knowing that he was unlikely to get caught, but that didn't change the guilt eating away at him, and the remaining upset upon realizing what humanity and existence truly were.

He didn't even notice the teacher threw some chalk at him and shouted about paying attention, merely continuing to take notes he was never going to look at again as he kept thinking about the massive change in his life.

 _Uhh… no, no wait. Maybe I'm wrong._ Light tried reasoning, _This is precisely what I've been thinking about lately. This world is rotting, and those who are making it rot deserve to die. Someone has to do it, so why not me? Even if it means sacrificing my own mind and soul, it's worth it. Because the world can't go on like this._

Upon getting home, he watched TV as background noise for studying without ever noticing what was on. Again, he lay in bed without going to sleep. Again, he resorted to over-the-counter sleep aids to get the rest he needed. 

Before he knew it, the next day was Friday. He sailed through the busywork of school and studying for entrance exams, but while the ship was moving, nobody was at the helm. His mother seemed to be concerned that Light was acting strangely, but he still had good grades, so she decided not to care, and he had long since accepted that somewhat upsetting fact. 

He realized that he couldn't ignore the file. What he'd learned he could not un-learn. He was just going to have to show some willpower. 

He wondered what would happen if someone else found this file. Was there anyone out there, other than him, who would be willing to eliminate the vermin from the world? If he didn't do it, then who would? There was no one, but he could do it—and to his knowledge, he was literally the only one who could.

He'd do it. Using the file, he'd change the world.

Having gone to the store collecting everyday objects to test with to see if he could somehow alter them, that night when he sat at his computer, he had no shortage of things to try, and a whole weekend to try them. 


	2. Chapter 2

First, Light selected the entire chunk of data that he now believed was essentially him, and copied it to a separate file, which he encrypted and copied to the storage card on his phone. He hoped his phone would even be able to handle that, but it was worth a shot.

 _I have to be careful,_ he thought. _I don't want to screw this up._

He wondered how something as complex as a human being could be encapsulated in a chunk of data small enough to be managed, but once he calmed down and thought about it, he could see how it might work. He saw that the file was a list of parameters, but not detailed descriptions. He could see the code that defined his heart. He verified this by taking his pulse and watching the numbers fluctuate in real-time. The numbers made no sense to him. They might not make sense even to a cardiologist, but they changed predictably in time with his pulse. The code described what the heart was doing and how it might differ from other people's hearts, but not what it, as a heart, was. It was as if somewhere else, there was another file that described human hearts in detail, and every person's data referred to that to render their specific heart. The same went for all the other organs. However, this was much less interesting to him once he realized that he had no access to the fundamental structure of his body, and could not, for example, transform his skeleton into an unbreakable metal.

There were other shortcuts built into the system as well. He ran a search for his current longitude and latitude. He understood the notation thanks to a brief flirtation with geocaching and had access to the actual numbers with a little looking on his computer. When he found his exact coordinates in the file, he decided to move around and see if they changed. He walked backward slowly while peering at his monitor with an ever-increasing squint. The numbers appeared to be changing as he moved. So, instead of tracking each person's absolute position in space, the system tracked them in relation to the Earth. After the coordinates, there was a number that he saw was his height above sea level. Light jumped, and though it was hard to read the screen while jumping, he could see that the number changed while he was midair, then returned to its starting point by the time he landed.

Light knew what he had to do next. If he didn't try, he'd wonder for the rest of his life.

 _No, that's not true,_ he thought. _I'd wonder until I eventually broke down and tried it anyway, so I might as well try it now._ He hunched over the desk without sitting, swallowed hard, and increased his altitude notation by one foot. He exhaled slowly.

"Now we see if I can fly," he said out loud to posterity—posterity, in this case, being his empty bedroom. He hit the enter key.

Instantly he was one foot off the ground. Just as instantly, he was falling one foot to the ground. Slightly less immediately, his full weight came down hard on the floor and his desk, jamming his wrists and twisting his right ankle. He was almost able to remain upright but eventually fell backward very hard into his desk chair, which bent permanently from the strain and knocked the wind out of him.

 _Okay,_ Light thought, _I can't fly, but I can fall whenever I want._

Light turned his attention back to the longitude and latitude. He took his phone to the far corner of his bedroom and noted the GPS reading. He returned to the computer, sat down, and entered the coordinates. He took a deep breath, hit enter, and was in the far corner of his bedroom. 

His feet were on solid ground, but the rest of him was in a seated position with no chair beneath him. His weight came down on his tailbone. It didn't break, but it felt like it wanted to. He took a moment before he got up and walked back to the computer.

He now knew he could teleport. He also knew that he had to put thought into how he'd do it, or he could seriously hurt himself. Again, he looked at the GPS app. He picked a spot about a mile away, a place that would be well lit, but where nobody would see him: the side parking lot of a grocery store. He entered the coordinates, stood up, bent his knees to absorb any shocks, extended his arms slightly for better balance, gritted his teeth, and hit enter.

He was in the side parking lot of the grocery store. He was glad that he hadn't changed out of his school clothes when he got home, and his wallet was still in his pocket. He did wish he'd kept his shoes on, but you can't have everything. He was grateful that only the pavement was wet and not the air itself. His computer was still back at home, so he couldn't merely teleport home. 

Instead, he walked home, eating a bad egg sandwich, thinking about what he would do next, both about the file and what he could do to the world with it. He still didn't know what that one number was that he had altered. He'd tried changing it with no discernable difference. However, he had found that by using criminals as test subjects, it somehow managed to change anything related to vitals to zero in an instant kill if he simply put zero as that number. That said, the same thing happened if he just used the file to stop the heart, which was much simpler and was easier for the file to load. He already had a macro in mind to use, which might be the first use of real magic in human history if he pulled it off. 

His wrists, ankle, and tailbone hurt, but the walk home and the ruining of a good pair of socks were totally worth it, both for the time it gave him to think and for the look on his sister's face that he knew was coming when she came to ask for help on her homework and found that Light had somehow escaped. 

"Why are you so loud up there?" Sayu asked as Light came in, "I wanted to ask you for help on my homework."

"I'll help you in a bit," he replied, "But what do you mean I was loud? I wasn't home. I walked to the store. See?" he said, holding up his sandwich wrapper and his now-empty drink cup with a small playful smirk. "It's exactly one mile away, so I've been gone a while."

"Why aren't you wearing shoes?"

He looked at his feet. "I like to walk quietly. You know that." She raised her eyebrow with a small grin,

"How do I know you didn't buy that food earlier, then just bring it down here?"

Light chuckled. "What makes more sense, that I ate some food, saved my trash, deliberately made a bunch of noise, then walk around outside after it rained in nothing but my socks just to come down here and lie to you for fun, or that I simply decided to walk a mile without shoes?"

She had no answer because neither option made any sense. Light returned to his room, a tired but happy man.

He minimized the file for a bit and went onto the smartphone app store. He found a combination of emulators that could pull up the data on his phone with some effort—no more walking home, or really, anywhere.

He had many more items on his mental to-do list for the weekend, but one more for the day before starting his big project to improve the world.

He spent quite a while searching before he found the fields for the date and time. He was past being surprised to find these entries in forms he could easily understand. He figured the program had just passed these concepts on to the people it created as a short cut. Why spend cycles creating new notation systems when it can just give people ones it already knows will work and get on with rendering trees?

He looked at the time notation for a long time. It was, essentially, the world's most accurate clock. The numbers seemed off until he realized it was Greenwich Mean Time. He was going to try time travel. He couldn't _not_ try, even though he was terrified of the whole idea. He carefully added thirty seconds to the time notation, hit enter, and... nothing happened. He double-checked, and the time notation hadn't accepted his input. He tried again, with identical results.

Light let out a long breath and said, "It's probably just as well."

A voice from the corner of the room said, "Try going back in time, not forward."

Light jumped, then looked toward the source of the voice. He saw himself standing in the corner, holding his phone, which Light was also holding. 

He was looking at himself. Not a picture. Not a reflection. He saw _himself._

Well, now he knew he actually was as good-looking as many had said.

They stared at each other for a moment. Finally, time-traveler Light spoke. "I said, you should try going back in time instead of forward."

Original Light was too busy freaking out to listen and didn't catch what Future Light said.

"What?" Light asked, snapping out of it.

Future Light shook his head. "Great, now I'm confused." 

" _You're_ confused?!"

Future Light looked irritated. He muttered something under his breath as he tapped at the phone in his hand. He looked up once more, made eye contact with Original Light, and disappeared.

Light walked over to the spot where his double had stood: no scorch marks or anything. Light didn't know what he expected would happen to the area someone time traveled into, then away from in quick succession, but he knew he expected more than nothing.

Light looked at his phone and saw the file's time field, ticking off the seconds. He quickly subtracted about thirty seconds from the time and hit enter.

The world around him did a reasonably fast dissolve between now and the dusty memory that was the world half a minute ago. He saw Past Light standing in the middle of the room, absorbed in his phone screen, looking disappointed.

Past Light exhaled and said, "It's probably just as well." 

Light felt sorry for Past Light. _I looked so sad,_ he thought. "Try going back in time instead of forward," he suggested helpfully.

Past Light was badly startled. He looked at Light with genuine panic in his eyes, which quickly cycled through incredulity, amazement, and confusion.

 _Great,_ Light thought, somewhat dismayed. _I'm easy to read. Maybe it's because I'm caught off guard or just know myself, but I need to get better at this if my plan is going to work._ He decided to try again. "I said, you should try going back in time, instead of forward."

Past Light opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. Finally, he managed to ask, "What?"

Light was not impressed with himself. "Great," he said, "Now I'm confused."

Past Light looked genuinely affronted. " _You're_ confused?!" 

Light gave up. "Fantastic," he muttered as he reset the time. He hit enter and watched his former self disappear as he returned to the moment after he left.

 _That didn't go well,_ Light thought. Upon reflection, he should have expected it. First meetings are always awkward, even if you're meeting yourself. _Next time should go smoother. I'll have a better idea of how to behave and how to react._

Light heard a quiet ahem to his right. He looked and was not surprised to see himself standing there, smiling at him.

"I'm you, an hour from now," he said. "Wanna play some video games?"


	3. Chapter 3

The first round, when he was Past Light, he lost _badly._ Then he went back in time and played through it all as Future Light. To be honest, he wasn't that into the second round at first and had mainly gone back and offered to play out of a sense of obligation. Then he started winning because he could remember some of the hands Past Light had. Any game is more enjoyable when you're winning, although he broke even in the end. 

He shuffled off to bed, more tired than he'd ever been in his life, but with his brain firing at full steam. He thought about what would have happened if he'd won the first round and then returned and won again. Was that possible, and if so, where would the winnings come from? Could he create infinite wealth by losing at, say, poker against himself? Of course, as soon as he moved out, he could create infinite wealth anyway, by simply moving a decimal point in the file. Actually, when he thought about it, he was pretty sure he could get into To-Oh university without taking the entrance exams, but that was unnecessary.

He eventually realized that if he was going to get any sleep, he would have to force the issue, so he decided to count doubles for a while. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096... This went on for a little while until he started wondering somewhere in the millions if he had missed a number somewhere and thrown off his whole train of thought, which had him again thinking about the file.

 _Forget this,_ he thought as he got up and took some more pills to sleep, and he was surprised to see his father in the bathroom doing the same thing since they seemed to only be capable of having one bottle in this whole house.

"Light, what are you doing up?" His Dad asked worriedly, "It's nearly 4am." Light shrugged absently, realizing at that moment that he had really thrown off his internal clock by spending an hour with himself playing video games, because he was ready for breakfast.

"I've been having trouble sleeping lately," he answered, taking some pills with a glass of water, "Nightmares."

"Is anything troubling you, particularly?" Light turned to his Dad, sighing. There wasn't exactly anything he could say that resembled the truth. How was he supposed to tell his father that he had learned the world was a computer program, played video games with himself, and was trying to find a way to change the world?

"I guess it's just the pressure Mom's putting on me to be perfect, plus the entrance exams next month."

"Don't worry so much about it, Light," his Dad put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, "Your health is more important, and you shouldn't be relying on pills to get some decent sleep."

"Then why are you in here?"

"Long night, and if I want to get back to the case with a clear head, I need sleep."

Light smiled hollowly. If he could succeed with what he planned to do, his Dad wouldn't need to work such late nights, "Well, goodnight, Dad. Will I be seeing you tomorrow?"

"I hope so," was the tired reply, "Sleep well, Light. Maybe try taking some time to yourself tomorrow, away from the entrance exams." Light looked away a bit, knowing the exams were the furthest thing away in his mind even when they really shouldn't be. 

"I'll try." He headed to bed.

...

Soichiro sighed as he watched his son head to bed, noticing the slight limp from what was probably a twisted ankle, and the scratches on the bottoms of his feet for some inexplicable reason. The bags under his eyes were starting to show, and he just hoped the boy wouldn't work himself into the ground so young.

Maybe it would be best to tell him about the file now...

He had been planning to tell Light about the file when he turned twenty-one. Not twenty when he was legally an adult and allowed to drink because while Light was a responsible kid, giving anyone access to God-like power and alcohol simultaneously was a parenting fail waiting to happen.

But seeing how exhausted Light was and worried about a future that could be changed at the click of a button, he wondered if he should tell Light about it now. The point of not revealing it in Light and Sayu's childhoods were so they would grow up to be responsible and understand the concept of working hard for what you have. Still, Light had clearly learned these lessons already, so maybe he should tell him...

But then there's the existential crisis that comes with knowing about the file. Soichiro himself had found it accidentally not long after becoming Superintendent when Light was a newborn, and it had been countless long nights wondering how to process this information. 

After maybe a month of debate, he had decided to learn how the file worked and make sure it wasn't possible to end up in criminal hands. He still couldn't figure that out, but he had learned how to create a barrier around a person so electronic devices would stop working within a three-foot radius of that person. But with how prisons relied on electricity often these days, that wasn't as effective as he would hope, so he kept that discovery to himself. 

One other thing he had discovered was how to stop the aging process. Upon learning that, he had reduced his aging to half-speed. Hence, while he was technically almost fifty, he was physically only thirty-nine, and he added some grey into his hair from time to time to make sure he didn't seem oddly young to be fathering an almost eighteen-year-old.

Sachiko didn't know, and Soichiro wanted to tell her every day, and sometimes, he wondered if his children's mental health would be better if he just told her, so she wouldn't push them to be perfect. But... they still had to know what it was like to be hardworking. He had already overstepped a boundary and changed her aging to half-speed too, and like with him, prevented illnesses. It wasn't that he wanted to defy the laws of reality more than he already had, but he wanted to ensure both he and Sachiko were there for their children and would be around to help them.

Maybe he should just tell Light already? But then that sparked the debate of if he ever told Light, because knowing Light, he would go back in time and tell himself about the file unless he managed to talk Light out of it. Then there was the complicated debate about how time travel couldn't change anything because everything that happened in the past had already happened. By that logic, Light might have already told himself about the file, and—this whole thing was too complicated for four in the morning. 

If it looked like Light was going to relapse into his less than healthy habits due to the stress, Soichiro decided he would tell Light everything and help him through the mental arguments and headaches that came with it. He would also set some ground rules about breaking the laws of reality, like specifying this secret had to be kept or who knows what would happen if others found it...

OoOoO

Around noon, Light was eating toaster waffles and drinking coffee while he stared at the file, and this particular choice of breakfast had earned a lot of odd looks from his family. 

The night before had been a dazzling rollercoaster of discovery, but the morning after was, as usual, a grim slog through the bumper-to-bumper commute of reality. He had proven that the file was a tool that could improve every aspect of his life. His aching feet, twisted ankle, jammed wrists, scratched feet, ruined socks, and his confused sister, all proved that he could also ruin his life if he continued to act without thinking first.

He had already decided not to change his body anymore. Until he understood the file much better, it was too dangerous. Better to just create money if he ever really needed to, and buy a health club membership.

He could fly, briefly. Really, he could place himself in midair for a moment before he fell to the ground. He had an idea of fixing that, but it wasn't anywhere near his first priority.

He could teleport. This was amazing, but also very dangerous. Happily, his clothes had teleported with him. He reasoned that the file, or the system that used the file, must define your clothes and the things in your immediate possession in relation to your location, just like it tracks your location in relation to the Earth. That was a relief. Light didn't want to have to explain to the police, aka his Dad, why he had materialized naked in a public place. Really, he didn't want to explain to anyone why he had materialized at all. He needed to make sure if he was going to teleport someplace, that in addition to having the right longitude, latitude, and altitude, he would need solitude. He required a landing zone where nobody would see him.

Lastly, he could go back in time and return to his starting point, but he couldn't go forward beyond that. He reasoned that this was because the past was a known state, but the future had not happened yet and was unknowable and unreachable. He didn't know for sure, and likely never would. The point was, he could go back in time and return to the present. Essentially, he was just teleporting to another time as well as another place. So, the parameters he needed were longitude, latitude, altitude, solitude, and... time.

The only way he could do all of these things was to access the file. He could access it from his computer and now from his phone. Public computers were out of the question. He couldn't install the software he'd need to securely access the remote computer that hosted the file. It looked like his phone was going to be his primary means of access to the file from now on, so he needed to make sure he didn't transport himself any place that the phone wouldn't work, or he'd be stuck. He pulled up his carrier's coverage map. It was now a map not only of reliable high-speed data access but also of the places where Light had God-like powers over time and space. That shouldn't have felt limiting, but it did.

 _I can instantly travel anywhere I want,_ he thought, _On this map of the planet, as long as where I'm going is in one of the red blobs. The dark red blobs, preferably. The lighter ones are iffy._

Light thought before he acted. He made a list of things he needed to do before he could proceed, arranged them in a logical order, and started working down the list.

He searched the file for his phone's serial number and model name. He was relieved to find them. He was afraid that the file would cover only people, but that clearly was not the case, and that worked both for better and for worse with his plans. The file was immense, much larger than even the huge listed file size, but not infinite, and he wasn't sure it was large enough for all people and all objects, but there it was, an entry for his phone. The entry wasn't very large. As with people, he supposed that mass-produced items like phones didn't need to be described in detail for every copy. Instead, each copy had an entry that described how it differed from others of its type, but the full description of what made it a phone resided in a separate file somewhere else.

He spent some time making a rudimentary phone app to automatically edit the file. He found the phone's battery level. In the file, it was accurate down to five decimal places. It was totally inaccurate on the phone unless you installed a separate app, which only gave you the reading in whole numbers. He verified that he had the battery level by checking the file against the battery app, then playing a juice-hungry game on the phone for five minutes. He rechecked the battery level and was sure he had the right field. He set the experimental app to run in the background, resetting the battery level to one hundred percent every ten seconds. He played the game again for another five minutes. Afterward, the battery was still full.

After an hour of searching, copying, and pasting, he had modified his phone to always have seventy-three percent battery remaining since one hundred percent would have looked suspicious. This would save him from needing spare batteries and carrying them everywhere.

He also made his phone always broadcast to and from an area covered by three separate cell towers and two power substations, no matter where the phone was actually located. It was an intuitive leap, but Light now understood that the radio waves produced by the phone were just as artificial as everything else, and could also be manipulated. If he could specify where the signal was broadcasting from, he could also specify when. Time, after all, was just another number in the file.

He had a harder time trying to reason his way through time travel. In the cold light of day, Light could see he'd been incredibly reckless in even attempting it. He'd also been incredibly lucky. In theory, once he'd gone back in time, there would have been two of him being described by the file simultaneously, which you'd think would result in some sort of error, which would be a bad thing. It hadn't, though. Light had reasoned that there was a program somewhere that accessed the file and used it to render the world and that the moment he was experiencing at any given time was as far as this theoretical program had gotten.

As for travel to the distant past, if reality really was a computer program, then it always had been, which meant the file had always existed. It was strange to think that the file predated the invention of computers, but it only predated the human invention of computers. Whoever or whatever had created the file had clearly invented computers long before whatever program Light was experiencing was written.

If the file had always existed, then, in a sense, everything in the file had always existed. So really, the only reason Light himself hadn't been around through all of history is that the program hadn't been given a reason to render him there, and now Light knew how to provide it with said reason.

Light couldn't prove anything beyond the existence of the repository file, but that was enough. He thanked himself for the millionth time for having learned to program computers and got to work. When the day was over, his app was good enough for the moment.

The app had three tabs. The first tab's icon was a dollar sign. It told him his checking account balance and allowed him to quickly change it. The app made the necessary edits to the file automatically. He had no plans to use this for a while, but he could do so if he was ever in a bind. It was better to be safe than sorry.

The second tab's icon was a compass. It used a popular mapping program's A.P.I to display a satellite map of the Earth. He could zoom in to look at an area, select a spot, and the app would input the coordinates and altitude into the file. A heartbeat later, he would be there. There was also a dialog box where he could enter a date and time. If he didn't specify a date and time, the app kept him in the present. There was a button to take him back to wherever and whenever he was when he last time traveled. A temporal undo button if you like. Handy for if he found himself someplace that he didn't want to be. He also had a list of places he'd teleported to and from. He could mark certain areas and times as favorites to make it easy to get back to them.

The third tab was labeled "?!" That tab had three buttons. 

The first button's purpose was to prove to people that he had the power he now had. If he hit it, the app would add three feet to his altitude. The button was labeled Hover. He hadn't figured out a way to alter his altitude and have it just stay changed, so instead, his app would re-enter the change ten times a second, keeping him in the air until he hit the button again. He tried it, and the experience was extremely unpleasant, but nothing he couldn't handle for the time being, and it was certainly impressive for having been made in a couple hours.

The second button said Home. One press would take him back to his front door. 

The third button was bright red and said Escape. Light had given that one some thought. 

He was sure that nothing he'd done was immoral...yet. He hadn't hurt anybody. He'd just helped himself. He was also pretty sure nothing he had done was illegal. Who writes laws against bending space and time to your will? 

But he was also certain that if anybody ever found out what he was doing, he would be in big trouble. If he was lucky, they'd just throw him in prison and keep his discovery for themselves. If he was unlucky, he'd be dissected as an alien. He knew that if things went south, especially with this new plan of his that could very well result in his execution if he was caught, he'd need an escape plan. 

He tried to think of someplace he could go where no government or corporation could find him. He knew that that was a problem in this day and age, but he also saw that was the answer. This day and age. He could escape to the past, and nobody alive today could touch him.

He knew that the things the file allowed him to do would seem magical to anyone who witnessed them. If he was going to escape to a point in the past, it should be a time magic was believed to exist. That way, instead of people yelling, "Magic! It must be some kind of trick! Let's beat him until he tells us the secret," hopefully, they would shout, "Magic! I've heard of that! I've never seen it in person, though!"

The trick was finding the time and place where the next sentence wouldn't be, "Let's burn him!" He tried to think of an example from history of a magician who had been revered. The only names he came up with were Houdini and Merlin. Houdini supposedly died after he was punched in the gut by a fan. That didn't seem promising. Merlin was King Arthur's wizard, and also probably fictional. Even if a real person had been the legend's germ, he certainly hadn't had any powers. He was perhaps just a shaman who was good at looking mysterious. He had parlayed that into a life of some prestige and a legend that had lasted until today. _That'll do,_ Light thought.

Sure, life in the Middle Ages probably wasn't very pleasant, but nothing said he had to stay there. It was just a safe place to go and chill out. If it turned out to be a nightmare, he could always jump further forward in time until he found someplace he liked.

He did a little research. Very little. He didn't expect to ever use the Escape button. He just wanted to have the option. First, he looked into the idea of trying to become Merlin himself. _Someone has to do it,_ he thought. That idea died ignominiously within the first minute of his research. Nobody knew for sure when, where, for how long, or indeed _if_ Merlin had lived. The one thing all of the scholars seemed to agree on was that if Merlin or any of the characters from the Arthur legend had existed, they probably did so in the sixth century, not a particularly pleasant time to be alive. Light let that idea go. Instead, he ran a search for the phrase the best time to live in Medieval England. The third result in the list was a link to the Amazon page for a book entitled, "The Best Years to Live in."

Medieval England, by Gilbert Cox. Light read the product description:

"In this, his seminal work, popular historian and television presenter Gilbert Cox makes his case that the period between 1140 and 1160, placed as they were, after the Battle of Hastings, before the Murder of Thomas Becket, and well before the Black Death, was the absolute best time to live in Medieval England."

 _Good enough for me,_ Light decided. He split the difference and set the escape date for 1150, and the place for Dover because the white cliffs were the only geological landmark in England that he could think of. He considered Stonehenge, but he didn't want to materialize in the middle of a bunch of Druids.

It was only a precaution for if things went south with his plan. He made the Escape button, but he hoped to never use it.

Now that worst-case scenarios had been dealt with, Light pulled out a notebook he had purchased the other day, and took a look in the file. It was time to get to work on his real project.


End file.
